When I began oil painting with only the primary colors (“double primary palette” means 2 each of the 3 primary colors + white), I wondered why I thought that 2 different sets of 120 colored pencils were necessary. Colored pencil is not a main part of my art-making life: De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and extremely slow production combined with low sales sent me to oil paints.

If one can paint using only the double primary palette, doesn’t it stand to reason that one could use a box of just 12 colored pencils?

In the last handful of years, my favorite brand of graphite drawing pencils is Tombow. This is a Japanese word which means “dragonfly”, for some unknown reason. (A country that names its companies things like “Google” or “Yahoo” isn’t allowed to poke fun at something as straightforward as “Dragonfly”.)

When ordering some art supplies recently, I saw that Tombow has colored pencils. I bought their box of 12. They aren’t available any longer, although I only bought them a week or two ago. Life is full of mysteries.

This stellar jay caught my attention (they are fairly demanding birds) in Mineral King a few weeks ago, and I chose it for my trial use of Tombow colored pencils.

This is small—5×7” piece of paper with about 1/2” margin—so it didn’t ignite any wrist troubles. You can see that I made up the background, and the colors aren’t exacatacally* right on the bird. Trying to do exact matches is good learning practice, but I am a little past that in my career now, and besides, no one cares. I loved the challenge of trying to force the right colors from a box of only 12.

If you are really into colored pencils and want to know a bit more, these are very soft, possibly even softer than Prismacolor. I prefer the Blackwing brand of colors, but they include a white and a silver pencil, which I find to be almost useless; this causes their overpriced box of twelve to only contain 10 useful pencils.

*My blog, my spelling, my pronunciations.